Archives For pics

It’s been a busy and inspiring coupla months. Here’s a little recap of things I saw and did, starting with the AWP Writers’ Conference in Washington, DC, where I was on a couple of panels, did a reading, and got to sign some books at the Rose Metal Press table. Those are my books on the left side of the sign:

My colleague and friend, David Dodd Lee had a book release and art show at Lang Lab. Here he his reading from his latest Ashbury erasure book, surrounded by his fans and collages:

I was thrilled to have my visual essay, “Empty Nest/Emptiness,” published (in full color!!!) in the latest issue of Passages North. It’s 14 pages, something I made when my daughter left for college:

Speaking of my daughter, I got to see Mamma Mia in Bloomington, IN with her and her bestie for her birthday. The next morning I saw the whole cast and crew in the lobby of my hotel!

Colson Freaking Whitehead came to my campus, Indiana University South Bend, and I got to sit in the almost front row. Here he is talking to Darryl Heller of the Civil Rights Heritage Center:

I’m just back from three weeks in Mexico City, where I studied some Spanish, worked on a new project, visited old loves like Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, and found new loves like Lilia Carillo, the painter, and Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god.

I love her amazing collection of retablos, amateur paintings made to thank the Virgin of Guadalupe for interceding at life-threatening moments:

These influenced some of her most famous paintings, and the museum juxtaposes small reproductions of her actual paintings with the retablos that inspired them:

At the Museum of Modern Art, I got to see Dos Fridasin person for the first time:

This painting was made after one of her breakups with Diego and represents two sides of herself, one as a comfort to the other. She is dressed in European attire on the left and in her classic Tehuana dress (which Diego preferred) on the right.

In all my times of viewing the painting online, I’d never noticed that the heart on the left is gray and withered:

And I discovered the beautiful abstract paintings of Lilia Carrillo:

We saw an outdoor film at the Monument of the Revolution:

about this guy, Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god:

…who was removed from his original site in Coatlinchan and relocated to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The film, La Piedra Ausente (The Absent Stone), tells the amazing story of the removal of the stone amidst the town’s protests and its celebrated/contested arrival in Mexico City.

[More Mexico City magic: The night before the film, we went to a birthday dinner for a friend and met a woman named Sandra. After we’d talked for a while, she said, “I made a film; it’s screening tomorrow night at the Monument of the Revolution. You should come!” So we did. It was awesome.]

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At the Palacio Nacional, we saw the journals of the artist Francisco Toledo, which were part of an exhibit of — get this — art that Mexican artists give to the nation as payment for their taxes:

These inspired a couple of my own journal sketches:

I thought I saw a Dirty Dancing sculpture, but it was just a strange sculpture that happened to have an ad for Dirty Dancing, The Musical behind it:

Finally, I should mention that there was a tree hanging in the center of our airbnb apartment building:

I got to spend a few days at West Liberty University last week, giving a reading and lecture, visiting classes, and chatting with students. Thanks especially to Steve Criniti, who invited me, and who organized everything, and who let me sit in on his British Modernism seminar, which happened to be about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and which happened to be the anniversary of her death (though we didn’t figure that out till later). Also thanks to Peter Staffel and his wife, who toured me around Wheeling, and to WLU’s graphic design student Corrine Martin, who created this awesome flyer with Fallingwater perched on a book:

I met all sorts of great faculty and students, but unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of people. Instead, here are a few views from the road. A strange combo of urban and rural along the Ohio River. I kept singing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”: Almost heaven, West Virginia…

This week’s WordPress photo challenge is saturated. And here’s an image that is saturated in color AND dripping with water: the cover of my new book!

Liliane’s Balcony comes out on Oct. 7 and is now available for pre-order. I would be really grateful if you ordered it. Free shipping, man. Direct from the publisher. They’ll have it in your hands in a little over a week.

Publisher’s Description:

Liliane’s Balcony is a multi-voiced novella-in-flash set at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Built for Pittsburgh merchants E.J. and Liliane Kaufmann in 1935, the house is as much a character as it is a setting. One September night in 1952, Liliane Kaufmann—tired of her husband’s infidelities—overdoses on pain pills in her bedroom. From there, Liliane’s Balcony alternates Mrs. Kaufmann’s mostly true story with the fictional narratives of four modern-day tourists who arrive at the historic home in the midst of their own personal crises, all of which culminate on Mrs. Kaufmann’s over-sized, cantilevered balcony. With its ghosts, motorcycles, portraits, Vikings, failed relationships, and many layered voices, Kelcey Parker’s Liliane’s Balcony is as dizzying and intricately beautiful as the architectural wonder in which it is set.

This week’s wordpress photo challenge theme is Foreshadow, which is something we writers try to do with subtlety and symmetry, and perhaps with a bit of surprise.

This setting of my photo-story is Okolicne, Slovakia – a beautiful town surrounded by the High Tatras Mountains near the border of Poland – in the summer of 2012. I am standing in the kitchen of an ancestral home, of sorts, with a relative who speaks no English, but with whom I communicate via smiles, nods, and frequent (like, really frequent) shots of Slivovitz and Metaxa.

It is approximately 8:00 a.m. – an hour that finds the rest of the world up-and-at-em but finds me semi-coherent if not still totally asleep, especially on a Sunday morning – and Josef pours me a shot of Metaxa. We toast one another: Na zdravie!

Why are we drinking a shot at 8 a.m. on a Sunday, and what might this moment foreshadow?

A trip to church, of course. After a short walk, we arrive at the church of Sv. Peter z Alkantara where my Slovak great-grandmother was baptized more than one hundred years ago. I take a seat next to Josef, and mass begins.

So, technically, the foreshadowing is the fact that it’s Sunday morning and I’m even awake.

F. Rint refers to František Rint who was put in charge of arranging all the bones.

This week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is UNIQUE, and what is more unique than a church decorated with the bones of 40,000-70,000 people? (Actually, lots of other bloggers have some equally unique photos, so you should check them out.)

The story goes that in the 13th century, the abbot of the church went to the Holy Land and brought back some Holy Soil that he sprinkled in the church cemetery. Suddenly, everyone was dying to be buried there! A century later, the Black Death was invented so that lots of people could die all at once. When people still continued to live, the Hussite Wars came along to try to finish the job. The little cemetery got too filled up, so a half-blind monk was assigned the task of unburying people. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

But what to do with stacks of unburied people? Turn them into chandeliers and shields, of course!

Like this:

I haven’t done a WordPress weekly photo challenge in a while, but how I can I resist this week’s topic: Love.

Last summer I went with classmates from my Czech language class on a day trip to Kutna Hora, an hour or two outside of Prague. To get to town from the train station, we had to take a bus through a run-down neighborhood of panelaks, those Soviet apartment structures that dominate the landscape of Eastern Europe.

A young Czech couple got on the bus, completely absorbed in one another, and I was so struck by these strangers that I secretly snapped a photo.

It’s hard to tell in the photo above, but the time was 16:28 (or 4:28 p.m. to us Americans), and that was my favorite accidental detail of the photo, that this moment of young love – fleeting as it may be – was marked in time. Later I made this small sketch with paint and pen.

Who knows if they are still in love? But they were in love at 16:28, and perhaps that is enough for a lifetime.

kelcey parker ervick

Web page

The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová

Liliane’s Balcony

For Sale By Owner: stories

Me

KELCEY PARKER ERVICK is the author of The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová, a work of biography, memoir, and art. Her first book, For Sale By Owner, tells short stories of suburban surrealities. Her second book, Liliane's Balcony, tells ghost stories at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. She teaches creative writing at Indiana University South Bend.

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